Dick Schaap - Joy In Mudville: The Big Book of Baseball Humor

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1992
by Doubleday It is here reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday.

Joy in Mudville. Copyright 1992 by Dick Schaap and Mort Gerberg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

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Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com

First Broadway Books trade paperback edition published 2000.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as:

Joy in Mudville: the big book of baseball humor / edited by Dick Schaap and Mort Gerberg.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Doubleday, 1992.
1. BaseballHumor. I. Schaap, Dick. II. Gerberg, Mort.
PN6231.B35J69 1994
817.5080355dc20 93-38456

eISBN: 978-0-307-78609-8

v3.1

T o the memory of our fathers,
Robert Gerberg and Maurice Schaap,
and our uncles,
Al Lavin and Harold Imber.
Boy, they really would have loved this one.

T HE AUTHORS WOULD LIKE TO THANKRebecca Brown, Lisa Siegel, Jeremy Schaap and Jeremy Goldstein for their help in gathering the stories, songs, cartoons and photographs that put the joy in Mudville. We would like to thank Rene Zuckerbrot of Doubleday for baby-sitting both the project and the authors. We would especially like to thank the writers and cartoonists whose work was squeezed out when we discovered, at the last moment, that there were more picks than pages. Wait till next time!

BY DICK SCHAAP

B ASEBALL WAS ALWAYS FUN. AS A TEENAGER, I organized a team that won the New York State Kiwanis championship two years in a row, once at the Polo Grounds, once at Ebbets Field. One of our best players was George Kandiloros, whose immigrant mother spoke very little English.

Every time I called George to tell him when and where our next game would be played, his mother would ask who was calling, and I would say, Dick Schaap, and she would say, Big shot?

Twice a week for two full seasons, I said, Dick Schaap, and she said, Big shot?

Georges English, at the time, wasnt much better. The next time I saw him, a decade later, he had changed his name to George Loros and he was working as a Shakespearean actor.

Baseball is a funny game.

When I was in college, Roger Kahn, who would write The Boys of Summer, took me out to dinner one night with Jackie Robinson, Jim Gilliam and Joe Black, three of the gods of my childhood.

The three Dodgers took turns telling stories about how dumb a young New York Yankee named Mickey Mantle was supposed to be. When it came to Jackie Robinsons turn, he said, Hell, weve got plenty of guys that dumb, but nobody that good!

A few years later, I met Lenny Bruce because of baseball. I was covering the 1960 World Series between Pittsburgh and the Yankees, and Bruce, who had just been labeled the sickest of the so-called sick comics by Time magazine, was appearing in a small night club on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

The night before each of the four games played in Pittsburghthey actually played all World Series games in daylight then, and thats no jokeI went to see Lenny Bruce perform. We struck up a friendship that lasted until he died half a dozen years later, mostly of harassment.

Bruce had only one baseball bit in his routine. He broke open a mezuzah, a case holding a small parchment scroll often affixed to the doorpost of Jewish homes, and read not the usual holy prayer, but the Pittsburgh rallying cry that season: Beat em Bucs!

I took Lenny to the seventh game of the World Series, the one Bill Mazeroski won with a home run in the bottom of the ninth, the only time a home run ever ended a baseball season, and I led him into the locker room afterward to witness the Pirates celebration. Dick Stuart, the first baseman known as Dr. Strangeglove for sufficient cause, sprayed Lenny with champagne. Lenny loved it. It was his first baseball game, and he never went to another. Any other game would have been anticlimactic.

Baseball helped me strengthen a friendship with another comedian. I didnt actually meet Billy Crystal through baseballI met Billy through boxing, but thats another story, and another anthologybut not long after I met him, I introduced him to Joe DiMaggio. The Clipper and the Quipper. What an impressive moment!

Only one of the two was impressed. Billy was unknown at the time. He was also considerably shorter than DiMaggio. He is now famous, but he is still shorter than DiMaggio.

Billy is a baseball player himself. He is the funniest shortstop Ive ever met (although Larry Bowa, once you get to know him, can really be hilarious).

Billy also plays baseball better than any comedian Ive ever met (Pee Wee Herman mustve been named after Pee Wee Reese and Billy Herman, the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers infielders, shortstop and second base, who ended up in the Hall of Fame, but I dont think it rubbed off).

Billy Crystal went to college on a baseball scholarship. Hes gone through life on a humor scholarship.

I once asked Billy, Who would you rather beCharlie Chaplin or Mickey Mantle?

I figured it was a simple question, but an alliterative one.

Billy thought it over and picked Mantle.

Billy once played catch with Mickey Mantleat Cooperstown.

Billy once played Charlie Chaplinin an HBO special shot in the Soviet Union.

Mantle and Chaplin.

Crystal must consider himself the luckiest person on the face of the earth.

Besides the home run Bill Mazeroski hit in 1960, I have witnessed other memorable baseball moments, historic and dramatic. As a thirteen-year-old, I saw, faintly, from a seat in the right-field corner of Yankee Stadium, Al Gionfriddos incredible catch of Joe DiMaggios bid for a home run to left-center field; I saw Carlton Fisks game-winning twelfth-inning home run in the sixth game of the 1975 World Series in Boston; I saw Nolan Ryan record his 5,000th strikeout, Pete Rose his 4,192nd hit and Gaylord Perry his 300th victory. But the moments I remember most vividly are the funny not the dramatic ones.

In 1956, I had tickets for the fifth game of the World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees. I chose to skip the game and search for an apartment. That day Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history. To this day, I have never seen a no-hitter. Thats funny to almost everyone, except me.

Ill never forget the day in 1978 when Reggie Jackson returned to the Yankees after a five-day absence. Billy Martin had suspended Jackson for disobeying instructions, for bunting when Martin wanted him to swing away. The incident created an uproar. An army of journalists awaited Reggies return in Chicago.